Episode 217: This week on Real Health Radio, Chris is chatting with Victoria Welsby. They chat about Victoria's past and difficulties and the different therapies, jobs and experiences that helped her to turn her life around, including CBT and EMDR. They also discuss Victoria's TEDx talk, appearing on a BBC Documentary and the similarities between cults and diet culture.
Victoria is a world-leading expert on body image and confidence, a TEDx speaker, and bestselling author. She went from being homeless, abused, with self-esteem that was achingly low into the courageous fat activist and change-maker she is today. Victoria helps people fall in love with themselves and is dedicated to shifting the way society views fat bodies
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 217 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at seven-health.com/217.
For the last little while, I’ve been starting this show talking about the fact that Seven Health is taking on new clients. At the time of recording this intro, we have just one spot left.
There are a handful of areas that I regularly work on with clients. One of the biggest is helping women to get their periods back, so recovery from hypothalamic amenorrhea, or HA. I’ve had clients regain their period after it being absent for 10 or even 20 years, often after being told that it would never happen again, or clients becoming pregnant who’d almost given up hope of it ever happening.
I also work with clients along the disordered eating and eating disorder spectrum. Many clients use the term ‘quasi-recovery’ to describe where they’re at because things are better than where they were when they were at their worst, but they’re still far away from being at that place of freedom that they so crave.
I believe in full recovery, and I’ve had many clients who’ve had multiple stays at inpatient facilities where nothing worked, but through working together, they’ve got to a place of recovery.
Transitioning out of dieting is another big one. Clients have had years or decades of dieting, and they know that it doesn’t work, but they’re really struggling to figure out how to eat and how to live without dieting.
Body shame and hatred and a struggle with body acceptance is the final common area. They want to get past this and be able to be present in their life and stop putting things on hold, but they’re unsure of how to even start.
In all of these scenarios, I use the core components of what Seven Health is about, which is science and compassion. We focus on physiology, so understanding how the body works and how to best support it, and also on psychology, understanding the mental and emotional side and uncovering someone’s identity and values and priorities and the traits and beliefs and how these can either be helping or hindering change.
It’s these kind of clients that make up the bulk of the practice, and I’m very good at guiding and supporting people through this process.
If any of these scenarios sound like you and you’d like help, then please get in contact. You can head over to seven-health.com/help, and you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. This will be the last time I’m starting with clients in 2020, and as I said at the start, there’s just one spot left. So if you’re wanting help, then please reach out. The link, again, is seven-health.com/help, and I’ll also include that in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. Today it’s another guest interview, and my guest today is Victoria Welsby. Victoria is a world-leading expert on body image and confidence, a TEDx speaker, and bestselling author. She went from being homeless, abused, with self-esteem that was achingly low into the courageous fat activist and change-maker she is today. Victoria helps people fall in love with themselves and is dedicated to shifting the way society views fat bodies.
I’d been aware of Victoria for a while now. It must’ve been a year ago or maybe even two years ago that I first watched her TEDx talk, and more recently I started to check out her podcast and really liked the information she’s putting out. One of her recent episodes was about the similarities between cults and diet culture. As I mention in the show, this was a topic I’d been wanting to do a show on myself for a really long time, and talking about cults and eating disorders. So after hearing this episode, I reached out to her and asked Victoria to come on the show.
As part of this episode, we chat about Victoria’s background and the many difficulties that occurred – poverty and trauma, abusive relationships, homelessness, and low self-esteem. We talk about how she was able to turn things around and the different things that helped – therapies like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and eye movement desensitisation reprocessing (EMDR), different jobs, and the experiences through these jobs that helped her, and also moving from the UK to Canada. We chat about her TEDx talk and how this then led on to her appearing in the BBC documentary Who Are You Calling Fat? Then we talk about cults and the similarities between them with diet culture and also with eating disorders.
There’s quite a lot of swearing in this one, mostly from Victoria, so just warning you.
This episode also ended rather abruptly. While everything seemed fine for the whole conversation, right at the end, the internet gods cut things off. We tried to reconnect to record the ending and talk about some extra points, but we just simply couldn’t get it to work. So I’ll be reading out Victoria’s contacts on her behalf. That is it for the intro. Here is my conversation with Victoria Welsby.
Hey, Victoria. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for joining me on the show today.
Victoria Welsby: Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me. Super excited to chat about some juicy stuff today.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. You have a wonderful podcast called Fierce Fatty, and you’re up to 50 odd episodes.
Victoria Welsby: I am.
Chris Sandel: All of them, or nearly all of them, are solo shows where you touch on various topics. Some are personal, covering aspects of your life and backstory. I mean, I think all of them are personal and you share your story, but some of them are where that is the only aspect of it, and then there’s others dealing with specific topic areas. For today, I want to cover some of those topics that you touch on as part of the show.
Victoria Welsby: Sounds like an amazing idea.
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Chris Sandel: Can you talk about your childhood? You grew up in Peterborough, is that right?
Victoria Welsby: Yes, I grew up in the UK in a place called Peterborough. Most people won’t know where it is, but it’s an hour outside London. It’s a bit of a dump. I’m sorry if you live in Peterborough; you probably agree with me. I lived in a very, very poor area. I come from a poor family, grew up in poverty.
My start in life was quite interesting. My beliefs about my body led me into accepting different situations which were not so great.
Chris Sandel: When you say your start in life was interesting, give us a little more detail on that.
Victoria Welsby: I wouldn’t say I was fat when I was a young kid. I was more ever so slightly plump. Joyously chubby. Even if I was fat, I’d still be joyously lovely, but I was a slightly chubby but not really child. Growing up in a household where my mum, who is a small lady, 5’2”, little Irish lady, she said that her body was bad. So I viewed my body as an extension of her body; therefore, my body was bad because it was fat. Her engaging in the binge/restrict cycle taught me a lot about food.
On top of that, living in poverty, we didn’t often have access to food. So when it did come into the house, it was like, “Ooh, food! Don’t eat it because it needs to last, but also food is so wonderful.” I got a lot of love and praise and reward being food.
My dad was an alcoholic, and that added another layer onto that. By the time I was 17, I had really, really low self-esteem. I thought I was absolutely out of control with food. I would fantasise about getting surgery to reduce my stomach and become thin. I thought, “Nothing is going to come to me in life.” At that time, my mum moved away from Peterborough and back to Ireland, where she’s from. My dad was an alcoholic still. I became homeless.
So at the age of 17, I lived in a shelter for young adults who were homeless.
Chris Sandel: Did your mum know that you were going to become homeless, or had you told her “I’ve got these other arrangements” and then that fell through?
Victoria Welsby: It was kind of both. To make up for my fatness in life as a child, I was an overachiever. I was very good. I was very responsible. So when my mum said, “I’m going to move back to Ireland,” I was like, “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’ll find somewhere to live.” It was a very chaotic time in her life, and she just said “Okay, that’s fine.”
In reality, being 17, legally I wasn’t allowed to rent anywhere. I worked as a cleaner after school, so I had only a few pounds to my name anyway. I couldn’t afford to rent anywhere. I didn’t tell any of my friends at school, so it wasn’t like I could sleep on the sofa of a friend.
I think if she looked into it, she would’ve known, or if she was capable, but at that time she wasn’t. My dad wasn’t capable of being there for me either. In my mind, it wasn’t that big a deal, being homeless. Someone like me, someone who’s so disgusting and ugly and fat and horrible. So it didn’t seem like a big deal to me, but it was actually a big deal to me at the time.
Chris Sandel: I don’t know if you said this already or if it’s just from the reading I’ve done and listening to your podcast – growing up in poverty, was there “I’m seeing other people around me; I know that there is homelessness amongst this area,” so it somewhat normalised it more?
Victoria Welsby: I didn’t see people in my area becoming homeless. I think I was still a bit young for that. But I knew the trajectory of my life was going to be not that good because of the area I was in. But I always had a little spark inside me that was like, “No, you can do better than this,” but it was really deep down somewhere in me. But yeah, being homeless, I hadn’t seen it but it was still not that surprising.
00:11:30
Chris Sandel: So you’re homeless at 17, and where do things go from there?
Victoria Welsby: It went from that to worse because I met a 30-year-old guy. Still 17. Met him at the club, and he was super creepy. Now I can say he was super creepy, but at the time I was like, “Oh my God, anyone is interested in me. A human man is interested in me.” Turned out that he was an alcoholic, so I was the perfect target, having an alcoholic father, and he went on to abuse me in every way that someone can be abused.
I was with him for two years. One way that he really wore down any self-esteem that I did have was to manipulate me with food and tell me what I was allowed to eat, when I was allowed to eat, monitoring my weight. At the time I thought, “He’s such a good guy. I can’t be controlled around food because I just want to eat it all, and he loves me so much that he is putting me on this diet because he cares about my health and he wants me to be healthy and happy.”
But it wasn’t. It was just straight up abuse. And that extreme restrictive diet that he put me on turned my disordered eating into what I would say was an undiagnosed eating disorder. Binge eating disorder. But to me, this was “Look, see? You’re so out of control, you need someone to teach you how to eat and to take food away from you because you’re so greedy that you would lie to your boyfriend and sneak food behind his back” and all that type of stuff.
Chris Sandel: Had you done something like Weightwatchers before? It sounds like it’s the extreme version of Weightwatchers where you have someone micromanaging your every move.
Victoria Welsby: I hadn’t at that point. I had done random diets I thought was a diet before. I did Weightwatchers after another relationship because I was like, “I’m going to be happy,” and I did Weightwatchers. But up until then, no, I hadn’t. But it is like an extreme version of – it’s straight up abuse. It’s just abuse.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. At what point were there red flags being raised for you? Was it early on that there were red flags, and you were in this position where “If I leave this guy, I’m going to be homeless again and I don’t really have any other options”? Or actually, it took a really long time for you to see this was a problem?
Victoria Welsby: It took a very, very long time for me to see it was a problem. Even after I left him, I didn’t think that what he did to me was abuse, even though he abused me in every way that you can be abused.
Because I saw the way that my dad behaved – he was an alcoholic; he was also a bit of a bully. Very domineering. My mum is very soft-spoken and agreeable. I saw this dynamic of what a woman is in a relationship and what a man is. So the way that he behaved, telling me what to do and being an alcoholic himself, didn’t seem that alarming. I just thought, “I’m going to fix it. I’m going to love him so much that he’s going to be cured from this alcoholism. If he’s not an alcoholic, then he’ll be a really nice person.” Turns out that he was just a massive dick. If he was drunk or if he was sober, he was just a bad person.
I knew that I didn’t feel good with him, but I didn’t really know why. There were things that I was like, “This doesn’t make me feel good, but it’s not necessarily his fault” – which now I’m like, it’s his fault. [laughs] Oh my God. So yeah, not even in the relationship, because I was that downtrodden or low self-esteem, I thought it was okay to behave in the ways that he was behaving.
Chris Sandel: How did you then extricate yourself from that?
Victoria Welsby: Luckily, I went to university and I stayed in my hometown to go to university, but I got a job working at a bar. I was so shy. When customers would come in, I would hide behind the bar and wait for a colleague to serve them because I was too shy to talk to people. That’s how shy I was.
Eventually I had to serve customers and talk to people, and it was a lively bar on a Saturday night, and that helped improve my communication skills and being able to talk to people. I made new friends, and one of the friends that I made could kind of tell that my boyfriend was a bit of a nob, and he encouraged me and he was like, “It’s not okay to feel like that,” and talked to me about what an abusive relationship is and things like that.
I, through him, got the courage to leave this guy. I wrote him a letter and put it in the house that we shared, through the door, and just ran away. And then the guy chased me through the streets because he was a scary, violent individual.
That was really difficult because I couldn’t really get any of my stuff, so I lost a lot of my belongings. He terrorised me and did all the normal things that abusers do when someone leaves. It was very dangerous and scary, and eventually I got a restraining order against him. I eventually then left the UK – not to get away from him, but that’s what happened.
Chris Sandel: Through all this, did you have friends, or was it very isolating and it was just you and this guy, and everything else was shut out?
Victoria Welsby: I did have a lot of friends. I was super popular and people loved me. I was very happy-go-lucky and that type of thing. But I hid everything. People said, “How’s your boyfriend?” and I’d be like, “Oh, he’s great, blah, blah, blah,” and if he was drunk I would make excuses for him. If people were like, “Why does he smell of vodka at 8 a.m. on a Monday morning?”, I’d be like, “Oh, it’s whatever” and would make excuses. I never told anyone what was going on, even my best friend.
Chris Sandel: Is that the same as well with your dieting history? Was dieting this thing that you did – and I know it was imposed when he became involved, but before that, was dieting something that you did on your own and you didn’t tell people about it? Or there was some kind of camaraderie that you were doing it with friends or with other people?
Victoria Welsby: I wanted people to know that I was trying to become a better person, a.k.a. reducing my body size. So any time I did make efforts to become smaller, I would tell everyone. I’d want everyone to know, “By the way, I know that I’m a piece of shit because I have a fat body, and I’m doing something about it. Therefore, I have redeemable qualities about me because I am dieting.” I was very vocal about that.
Chris Sandel: Was it something that was done en masse? Were there lots of people who were in a similar situation who were also dieting, or were you on the fringes and not many people were participating?
Victoria Welsby: In my earlier life, it was just me and my family. Then when I got into a structured program, I forced my boyfriend at the time to come along even though he wasn’t fat. So I involved him. It was just me, really, but I would talk to friends about it. So yeah, it was pretty much just me.
00:22:10
Chris Sandel: I remember there was some reason that you got CBT when you were a child. Can you remind me of that and talk a little about that experience?
Victoria Welsby: When I was living in a very dangerous neighbourhood, there was a local paedophile that would hang around. He targeted me, and he would indecently expose himself while I was playing in the garden or when I was walking around the streets playing, on my own or with friends.
That caused me to have a great deal of trauma and a massive amount of fear of being in my house, which should be somewhere that’s safe. Being anywhere near my garden – the back side of my house was really, really, really scary, and I couldn’t be in a room on my own. I couldn’t ever have the light off. I couldn’t even go to the toilet on my own because I was so afraid to even flush the toilet. I was that terrified.
That went on for a while, and I don’t know how this happened, but my mum took me to the doctor and said, “There’s something clearly going on with her,” and they got me into therapy. At the time – that was probably the ’90s – therapy was not heard of. It was kind of “if there’s something wrong with you, you’re stuck with it.” So I feel I was so lucky that I was able to go through that.
That was a shit time, but the therapy really, really helped me to show me that I can overcome very, very difficult situations. The fear that I had in me was so, so powerful, but with slow steps forward and building trust and slowly having little moments of bravery, I could turn things around. So I had, like I mentioned before, that little spark in me, that belief that I could turn things around if they were really shit. That was in me.
Chris Sandel: At what age was it that you had the CBT?
Victoria Welsby: I was in primary school, and I think I was in about Year 5, so that’s maybe eight years old.
Chris Sandel: Which is interesting in the sense that I remember – it mustn’t have been until I was 18 or 19, or it might have even been when I moved to the UK at 21 or 22 that I started reading more around psychology and got probably more into Tony Robbins and that kind of thing to start with, but starting to understand the mind and having an internal dialogue and how those things can affect your emotions.
So for you to have CBT when you were at such a young age, and then to know that information from age eight onwards – I know it’s a horrible way for you to be exposed to that, but I guess it’s advantageous in some ways to have had that experience with CBT and start to get a sense of what’s going on in your mind from that very young age.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, exactly. I feel fortunate that I got therapy. Imagine if I didn’t. Oh my gosh, I’d still be having to get someone to flush the toilet for me. [laughs]
00:23:40
Chris Sandel: There was another incident as well that then led you to get EMDR, with you being knocked off your bike. Can you talk a little about that, and also just a little about EMDR? I haven’t covered it before on the podcast, so it’d definitely be something I want to delve into.
Victoria Welsby: I love EMDR. Ooh, give me some EMDR. EMDR stands for eye movement – I can never say this word – desensitisation reprogramming. [laughs] Say the word for me?
Chris Sandel: Desensitisation.
Victoria Welsby: Thank you. It’s like the word ‘ammunition’. For years I couldn’t say ‘ammunition’. Anyway, EMDR.
I was on my bicycle and someone hit me from behind, and I was then afraid to ride my bicycle. I was in my early twenties. 19, 20, that type of age. I was afraid to ride my bicycle, so the insurance company said, “You should go to therapy.” I thought, why not? It’s free. I didn’t think it was that big a deal.
The therapist was a trauma therapist, and he was like, “We’re going to try this thing where we do these really weird things.” I was like, “I ain’t paying for it, so I don’t care. Do what you want.” He got this block of LED lights, and the lights would flash from left to right, left to right. Then he had headphones on me, and the headphones would beep, left to right, left to right, in concurrence with the lights going left to right. Then he had me hold pulses in my hand, and it would buzz left, right, left, right. I’d just be watching this light and my eyes would be going left to right – kind of like what a hypnotist does.
Chris Sandel: With your eyes open or your eyes closed?
Victoria Welsby: Eyes open. There’s lots of different ways to do it. Later on I went to another therapist who I did a lot of processing of my trauma with, and she just tapped my knee and I closed my eyes. But this one was eyes open.
What it’s doing is getting you into a state where when you’re falling asleep, when you’re in that rapid eye movement (REM), you’re accessing different parts of your brain and you’re processing what happened during the day, and your brain is categorising it as “Let’s put that into a memory that we don’t need to remember. We don’t need to know what we had for breakfast 17 years ago on a Monday. Forget about that. But 17 years ago on a Monday, I had this terrible traumatic thing that happened; I’m going to take that memory and put it in a different part of my brain as a current threat, because that was really scary.”
You’re getting to a point where you’re in a more influential state because you’re able to process these memories and these traumas a little bit better. Then the therapist talks to you about the thing that happened and gives you alternative scenarios of what could happen. Like, “What could happen if you rode your bike and you successfully navigated a roundabout and you weren’t hit?” You just imagine that happening.
Or – because I was doing a lot with the abuse of my boyfriend – “Imagine feeling safe and feeling calm,” and things like that. It helps process these current threats and put them into the memory side of your brain so that you no longer have to constantly think about it and have these big triggers and have it rule your life.
Because my trauma with riding my bike was a very small trauma compared to the other things I’d experienced, within three sessions I was going out there doing wheelies and all sorts because I wasn’t scared anymore. He was like, “Well, you’ve got ten sessions. What else do you want to do?” I was like, “Well, I kind of get travel sickness.” He’s like, “Yeah, let’s do travel sickness,” and we spoke about other things.
Anyway, years later, when I realised I had some really serious CPTSD, I thought, “I wonder if we could do some EMDR on it.” After years of previously doing just CBT, the EMDR – it feels like a miracle because you’re able to process these things that have been in your brain, bothering you for years and years and years, with just a few sessions. It’s so wonderful. I want everyone to know about EMDR and try it if you have trauma.
Chris Sandel: When you spoke to the person who did the EMDR to start with when you were in the UK, and then later on when you were doing it for more of the heavy duty trauma, were you someone who responded pretty well? Were you someone who was average? Just because when I hear your story, talking about this, you seem like someone who responded very quickly to this. So I’m just trying to get a sense – is that normal?
Victoria Welsby: At the time when I was doing the first one, I was very closed off. I couldn’t talk about anything. The therapist said, “Tell me about your family unit. Do you have a mum and a dad?” I was like, “Yeah, I have a mum and a dad,” and I burst out crying because I couldn’t even say the words “mum and dad.” He’s like, “What’s wrong with you?” He didn’t say it like that. I wouldn’t say anything at all. I was very closed off and very guarded about my trauma.
But with the bike trauma, I was like, “Whatever. It’s just a bike. I don’t care.” So I was probably very open. I didn’t really believe that what he was doing was going to do anything. It sounds a bit quacky, so I was like, whatever.
But I think when I went the second time, I was a lot more open to discussing these things. I think I am a ‘good’ therapy goer, but I don’t think anything special or anything bad or anything like that.
Chris Sandel: For people who are listening to maybe get a sense of how quickly it’s meant to work on the average, have you read – go on.
Victoria Welsby: When I went to my therapist for the big trauma, I said to her on my first session, “How long is it going to take to ‘fix’ me?” Because I was like, I don’t want to pay for these sessions because they’re expensive. She’s like, “I don’t know, 10 sessions?”
Within 10 sessions, there was a massive difference. Now, I still have that therapist to this day. We no longer do EMDR because the way I see it is that you always need a therapist. You don’t need to see them every day, but because you’re a human being and you have a brain, the same way you need a doctor.
But the thing is, with the EMDR, it processes things way quicker than traditional types of therapy. Not that it’s a brand new thing; it’s been around for years now. But people will get quick results. Like my therapist says, maybe 10 sessions, question mark? And 10 years later, you’ll still be there. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: [laughs] Okay. I was going to say, have you read Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker?
Victoria Welsby: No.
Chris Sandel: It’s one of my favourite books from last year. Really fascinating looking at all of the different aspects around sleep and what it does and why it’s helpful.
One of the things that he talked about in that was with PTSD, with normal everyday struggles and difficulties, when you go to sleep, the REM sleep is the part that’s quite soothing, and it’s the thing that then is able to tag those memories and to actually deal with them in a way so that after some breakup or some heartache or some difficult conversation, after a number of days of sleeping, you’re able to find that you’re getting over it.
The problem with PTSD is that it is such an experience – and there’s lots of different reasons for this, but one of them is that stress hormones are then so high that your REM sleep is not effective at being able to tag that memory correctly and be able to process it, so it just stays there as if it was on Day 1, even if you’re 10 years, 20 years later.
He talked about in the book that they were able to give some medication that was able to bring down the adrenaline levels – I think it was adrenaline – and that then allowed the REM sleep to be able to help in PTSD.
Victoria Welsby: That’s really cool.
Chris Sandel: The way that you were then talking about in terms of the lights and the eye movement and basically starting to change the memory and change the stress levels that are associated with the trauma then allows your body to be able to tag and process it – yeah, I can see a lot of overlap between the EMDR and REM sleep when it’s working as effectively as it should be.
Victoria Welsby: That’s so interesting. Yeah, and a lot of my trauma would come out in my dreams because I’d be having nightmares every single night. I guess because my brain wasn’t processing it.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. In a sense, in ordinary life, if you’re dreaming about it, then that should be part of the processing piece. But if there’s that stress attached to it, it just doesn’t let you tag it properly and move it to where it should be.
Victoria Welsby: Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker. I’m going to read it.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. The disclaimer is there’s mentions of obesity and there’s bits that I don’t necessarily agree with, but on the whole, he does a really good job at explaining why we sleep, all the processes that go into it. I haven’t had a client yet who’s read that book who hasn’t then been like, “Okay, I need to reprioritise sleep.” It really does fundamentally shift how you think about sleep.
For a long time, I’ve talked about sleep as being one of the real cornerstones to good health – physical health, mental health, emotional health – and that book is really just a treaty towards that and why it should be prioritised in a way that it really isn’t in our society – and often because it’s out of someone’s control, they’re working two jobs, there’s all this stress, etc. But we focus on so many areas that we deem important, and I think sleep is often one of those ones that gets missed off or is left behind. It doesn’t get the same attention when actually it’s probably ranking above most things.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely need more evidence to support me sleeping 75 hours a day, so thank you. Thank you, Chris. [laughs]
00:35:12
Chris Sandel: I know you said you were working in a bar at some point. What other work were you doing before you moved over to Canada?
Victoria Welsby: I then worked in a call centre, which was horrifying for my low self-esteem but also good, because I had to talk to human beings and people that were angry and stuff.
And then I went into recruitment, which was also horrifying because I had to speak to people who I thought were important human beings, like CEOs of companies, which was also good for my self-esteem. Then I moved to Canada as a recruitment consultant.
Chris Sandel: I’m quite a big one when working with clients to do exposure therapy of sorts. So if there’s something you fear, let’s do it in small doses multiple times until you get over it. It sounds from everything you described there like your career was sort of exposure therapy to build up your confidence and your esteem.
Victoria Welsby: Oh my gosh, 100%. If I hadn’t done those jobs where I had to speak to other human beings, I would be still very, very, very shy. And I’m so pleased that I did because I learned how to talk to other humans. Even though they were really shit jobs because it was not a good environment, still, it taught me a lot of things about speaking.
Chris Sandel: Do you think you are someone who is naturally shy? Or it was more a matter of upbringing and experiences that then meant that the shyness was more of a defensive mechanism?
Victoria Welsby: It was a learned behaviour. I’m an extrovert. I like to think I’m an introvert because I like staying in and things like that, but I am an extrovert. But the way I was brought up, my mum is very quiet and shy, and she would always be like, “Don’t raise your voices. Don’t speak up.” When she would speak to people, she would stumble over her words and sometimes not be able to speak. “Don’t let people see you or notice you. Just be quiet.”
It was a learned behaviour. “Just be quiet because what you’ve got to say isn’t important. Your voice doesn’t matter. Just don’t be an inconvenience for other people, and a great way to do that is to be invisible.”
Chris Sandel: What then prompted your move to Canada?
Victoria Welsby: Another juicy story. [laughs] What prompted my move was that I was dating this guy, and I was like, “He is my future husband. He is the most amazing, incredible human being ever.” Because I’m such a massive geek around true crime and psychology and all that type of stuff, now I’ve realised that he was actually a narcissist. But I was in the love bombing stage and the fairy-tale stage. It was 10 months into the relationship.
But one day I found out that he had three other full-time girlfriends. So I messaged one of the girlfriends and was like, “Who are you?” She was like, “I’m his girlfriend.” She was like, “Who are you?” I’m like, “His girlfriend.” So then she came round to his house and we were like, “Oh my God.” Then we messaged the other girlfriend.
Chris Sandel: Had you got his phone or his email?
Victoria Welsby: I was in his laptop. He had gone to play rugby for the day somewhere else, and I had this sneaking suspicion. I wouldn’t do this now because I wouldn’t think it was appropriate, but then I hacked into his Facebook account. ‘Hacked in’. [laughs] I went into his Facebook account and looked at his messages, and there was a message there from this girl. I recognised the name because he said, “I’ve got this psycho ex-girlfriend and she’s really stalking me.” It was a message saying, “Are you okay? Where are you?” sort of thing. I was like, that doesn’t sound psycho to me.
So I messaged her, and she was like, “Uh, what’s going on?” So there were four of us. Girlfriend 4 didn’t believe us. She had just started dating him, and she was like, “No, don’t say that about my boyfriend. He’s so lovely.” We were like, “Well, we’ve got all the evidence you want.” We became friends.
Chris Sandel: All four of you, or just the three?
Victoria Welsby: No, the three. Number four never believed us. Eventually she probably found him out.
That was a big changing point because I thought, “Fuck it, what am I doing? I’m just going to run away and escape to Canada.” My sister had moved there. “I give up on England. All of this bad stuff has happened.”
But also, it was a changing point because I saw these other girlfriends, and we were so similar. We had the same personalities. We all look the same. And I could see that they were beautiful and smart and funny and accomplished and really great catches, and then I looked at myself and I was like, “But why would he date me? I’m fat and unattractive. Maybe I’m funny sometimes, but really, I’m pretty ugly.” Before, I thought he was being a good guy.
After I discovered he wasn’t a good guy, it made me realise that he also saw in me that I was beautiful and accomplished and charming and blah, blah, blah. So I realised in that moment that I had a flawed view of myself. It wasn’t fact that I was repulsive because I had a fat body. That really was the stage where I thought, “Okay, something’s going on in my brain. I need to work on it here because it’s not my body’s fault that I’m getting into shitty situations.”
Chris Sandel: Talk about finding the silver linings in a situation. But it is great to hear that the takeaway was “Hang on a second, I am worthy and valuable, and he’s seen something in me that I haven’t necessarily even seen in myself,” and that then being a turning point.
Victoria Welsby: Totally. All of these unfortunate things that happened to me, I’m always like, I’m kind of happy that happened because something really good came out of it. Not always, because I’m not a perfect human being, but there is definitely a silver lining for this one, for sure.
00:42:10
Chris Sandel: With the move to Canada, I know you mentioned your sister was there; was there also an “I’m going to go there, I’m going to reinvent myself, it’s a fresh start”? Was it that kind of thing?
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, reinvent myself and become this great person. But going to Canada, there was a greater emphasis on being ‘hot’. I thought, “I’m going to get a job in a bar to start out,” and I realised that I couldn’t get a job in a bar because I wasn’t ‘attractive’ enough. Because in Canada, in Vancouver, all of the bars, the waitresses or the waitstaff have to look a certain way. That’s not the case in England. In the UK, anyone can pull pints.
In Vancouver, as well, it’s very yoga, health food, fatphobic, basically. So then I was like, “Oh, I’m really unattractive. In England I could get by because I had a good personality and whatnot, but here, my jokes aren’t landing with the Canadians as well and they don’t understand what I’m saying as much. And also I’m really very, very unattractive according to them.”
Chris Sandel: Hearing that, that can go one of two ways, where there’s some kind of death spiral of pity and feeling bad about yourself, or you then double down on your new realisation of “No, I am really worthy,” and going more in that direction.
Victoria Welsby: Fortunately, because of the previous experience, I realised that I probably wasn’t going to get a thin body – although that didn’t stop me from trying for at least the next few years – and that there was something else going on. That’s when I started therapy in Canada, and that was my long journey to getting to this place where I am today.
But getting to this place where I think that my fat body is okay and I think that diets don’t work was probably the final step. Everything else in my life was really good. I’d worked out the trauma and I’d learned how to have healthy relationships and set boundaries and all that type of stuff, but I was still like, “But I’m fat. Can’t I just become thin? I’m so good at everything else. Can’t I just become thin?” That was the last thing to fall into place.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Which is interesting because I think a lot of the time it’s the other way round for a lot of people, especially, often, when people are getting over eating disorders as well. There’s this idea of “Okay, once I stop the dieting or once I recover, then everything in my life is going to be great,” and it’s like, no, that’s normally when the work on the trauma or the setting of boundaries or all of the other lifestyle things start to come in. You’ve in a sense done it in the reverse order where that was the last remaining piece to deal with.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah. I feel that when you’re living in a fat body, it’s very unlikely that someone’s going to say to you, “Hey, by the way, do you know it’s not your body that’s the problem? You don’t need to lose weight.” More often, you’re going to have people say, “It’s a really good idea for you to lose weight.”
Even if you are in an eating disorder, that a lot of times is encouraged. So it’s very difficult to know that dieting behaviour is not helpful when the whole world is telling you, if you have a fat body, that it is and it could be.
Chris Sandel: What about with your sister? What was her relationship with food like? What was her body like? What was her general life skills like? Was it going over and seeing someone who had all their shit together, so you’re like, “Cool, I want to emulate this”? Or was there a lot of her going through her own life journey and trying to figure things out?
Victoria Welsby: My sister is a couple of years younger than me. In my family, I’m one of six – hang on. Yeah, six. God. [laughs] There are so many of us. I was the second youngest, so I feel like my older siblings got the brunt of the disordered lessons and the shit because they lived with my dad longer. I was maybe six when my mum divorced my dad, so I maybe had six years of it, my sister maybe had four years.
I see myself as fucked up a bit from my childhood, and then my sister had a lot less because she had two years less. She was the one who was more well balanced. Of course still affected by diet culture. She’s straight size and she always has been around straight size; she didn’t have the same issues around food. So she was very stable.
I don’t know if I recognised that she was stable, so I didn’t necessarily think “I want to be like her.” But now I’m like, it was nice to have someone who wasn’t really unstable. I am really close with her. So that was lucky for me.
Chris Sandel: When you got over there, you said that bartending was out. So what work were you then doing?
Victoria Welsby: I went into recruitment and I got a job with some dodgy company. I was like, “No one’s going to hire me because I’m so ugly,” but that wasn’t true. But yeah, I did recruitment and I spent the next nine years in recruitment.
00:48:54
Chris Sandel: At what point did you then start to make the transition into body acceptance and wanting to then coach and be in this field, working?
Victoria Welsby: I’ve had my business for five or six years now, so it would’ve been a couple of years before that, after all of that therapy, that I saw Ragen Chastain’s blog, Dances With Fat. I don’t know how the hell I saw this. I don’t know, but anyway, I saw this, and on her blog was the message “It’s okay to be fat.” I was like, “What the fuck? Who is this person? No, it’s not okay to be fat, but I’m going to read some more.”
I just remember the moment, lying on my bed, reading my phone, saying to my then-boyfriend, “Did you know this? Did you know that diets don’t work? And did you know that you can be fat and healthy?” He was just like, “Whatever.” It was a life-changing moment for me.
From then, I became obsessed with this because it was the missing thing that I was looking for. I was like, “Why can’t I just become thin and therefore good?” I had been working for years to get this feeling of being there, wherever ‘there’ was. I realised that I was going about it the wrong way.
The concept that you could live in a fat body and it be okay was not even something I’d ever heard of. It became an obsession of mine to spread that word.
At that time, I had begun coaching people for career-related stuff and writing resumes and things like that on the side when I was doing my full-time job, and then I became an adjunct professor teaching job type stuff. Then I trained to be a coach, and Fierce Fatty was born. It wasn’t actually Fierce Fatty; my business was originally Empowered Life. But the concept of Fierce Fatty was born about five years ago. I’ve been unstoppable ever since. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: Off the back of Ragen Chastain, is it then that you found Health at Every Size and Intuitive Eating and that all spawned from there?
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, everything. I was voracious. I consumed everything I could about this topic.
00:51:31
Chris Sandel: How did the TEDx talk about come about?
Victoria Welsby: I like talking, and it turns out that I’m pretty good at it, actually, even though I was terrified to do it for a long time. It was another thing that I just wanted to tell the world, “Hey, listen up here. Did you know it’s okay to be fat?” I learned how to speak. I did a course about how to speak, and also then how to get a TEDx speaking opportunity and applied to my local TEDx. After a lot of effort and whatnot, got through and did the TEDx.
Chris Sandel: How was it in terms of putting the talk together? Did you know when you were starting to apply, “This is clearly what I want to cover in the talk”? Or they gave it to you and you’re like, “Shit, now I need to think of something to cover”? How prepared were you when you started to apply?
Victoria Welsby: Oh, you have to be 100% prepared. You have to basically know your whole talk from start to finish. You submit a two-minute video with the concept you’re going to be talking about, and it has to be really, really good because, again, loads of applications. A person just talking to their camera being like, “I just want to talk about happiness” or whatever. You have to be very well thought out.
I did a whole e-course on just how to do that two-minute video for the application because that’s how all TEDx applications are. Pretty much all of them, you do the two-minute video.
Then it’s so many different stages, and then you do a two-minute talk. You’re not accepted at that point. Then you do a five-minute talk, and you’re still not accepted. I think you then do a 10-minute talk, and then you got accepted to actually do it. But the TEDx I did was a prestigious one. There’s some TEDx where they’re just like, “You’ll do. Anyone could do it.” I’m lucky that my one was one of the best because it meant that the quality of the talk I delivered was a lot higher because of that.
Chris Sandel: Nice. Where was it filmed? Was that in Vancouver?
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, TEDx Vancouver. It was in front of 2,800 people, and I think it’s been viewed now online maybe 130,000 times.
Chris Sandel: Wow. How was it on the day? Were you nervous?
Victoria Welsby: I wasn’t. I had moments where I’d be like, “Oh shit.” I was the final speaker because I had a big reveal at the end. My talk was the highest energy one. So I had to listen to all of the other speakers first. I had an attitude of “What’s the worst that can happen?” I thought, “The worst that can happen is that I forget my words. There’s 2,600 people there that will see me forget my words, and whatever. It’s not that big a deal. When they do the filming they can cut it together and make it look like I knew what I was saying.”
Then I thought, what else is bad that could happen? I could shit myself onstage. I was wearing a dress, so if I shit myself, everyone would see. I thought, “Well, if I do shit myself, could I survive it? Would it be a funny story? Would I then be able to maybe do a TEDx talk the next year about how I tried to do a TEDx talk and I shit my pants?” Probably. I just thought, the worst that can happen, I can survive it. And the best that can happen, that would be pretty cool.
So I was just really excited. And I had practiced the talk about 50 billion times, so I wasn’t going to forget my words, and I didn’t feel like I needed to shit, so I wasn’t going to shit myself. That didn’t happen. It went pretty well.
Chris Sandel: Nice. In the final, on the day, are you happy with how it all came out?
Victoria Welsby: On the day, yes. Now, a couple of years later, no, because I’ve evolved in those last couple of years, and there’s certain things I would tweak and change. I’m like, “Oh, I wish I didn’t say that word,” and “I wish I did this and that” or whatever. But yeah, on the day, I’d say it was one of the best experiences of my life, standing onstage at the end with my arms in the air and the audience giving me a standing ovation and being like “Revel in me! Yes, this is amazing!” It was pretty cool.
Chris Sandel: Nice. Just from a business perspective, how helpful has it been for you in terms of getting clients or being able to market with “Hey, I’ve done a TEDx and here is the video of that TEDx talk”?
Victoria Welsby: I think it’s hard to quantify. I think saying that you’re a TEDx speaker, people think that you have a certain amount of intelligence, question mark? [laughs] It gives you some level of authority, I guess.
People watching my talk is a really good imitation and a really good introduction into who I am, but I wouldn’t say that when my TEDx talk came out the next day I had hundreds of people being like, “Take my money!” It wasn’t like that. It was more of a slow burn and more of a “Here, this is what I believe in. If you like it, then come and join me on this journey.” It was more of a slow burn type of thing.
00:57:11
Chris Sandel: It was the TEDx that then led on to the BBC show, the Who Are You Calling Fat?
Victoria Welsby: Yes, it did. That’s a good point. That did lead to that opportunity because they watched my TEDx, and then the BBC contacted me and said, “Hey, do you want to be on this TV show?”
Chris Sandel: Talk a little about that TV show. I haven’t watched it, so I know of it, but I never actually got to watch it. I’ve obviously heard your commentary on it, but talk about what it was and what the experience was like.
Victoria Welsby: Last year I was approached by the BBC. They wanted to do – they called it a social experiment, where they had a house, and in the house there were nine people who are fat, plus size, bigger bodied – they had various ways to describe themselves. Some of the people liked being fat and some of them didn’t, and there was a couple who were like, “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m just fat, and whatever. I’m here for the ride.”
There was a guy who had stomach amputation surgery, and there was a person who was working to eradicate fatness, and there was a guy that had diabetes and then went on a diet and reduced his symptoms, and then there was a plus size male model. There was a fat club promoter. There was me. Those were some of the fabulous fat people.
Anyway, we all lived in the house for 10 days, and every day, we spoke about what we thought about fatness. We did different activities, and every day there was an activity led by one person. The days with the people who didn’t like being fat, their activities were things like getting a doctor to come in to tell us that we’re all going to die any minute and getting someone else to come in and tell us that we’re all about to get Type 2 diabetes. Yeah, really fun things. [laughs] Really fun experiences.
Then the people who liked themselves, we did activities that were a little bit more fun, I guess, because we don’t think it’s bad to be fat. My activity was to go into the city centre, which was Oxford, and do a little bit of fat activism, which was standing in my bikini with a blindfold and a board that said, “I’m standing for those who don’t love their bodies. If you think we should love all bodies, draw a heart on my body,” and I invited the rest of the house to join me. A couple of others did.
Chris Sandel: Nice.
Victoria Welsby: That was pretty cool. It was an emotional TV moment, lots of people crying and stuff. The public were very nice. No one threw empty Coke cans at us or anything like that, which was what I worried might happen. [laughs]
There were lots of discussions. We all got on pretty well, but it was draining to be around fatphobes for that long and have to say, “Hey, fat people deserve to live.” That was difficult. And also wonderful to spend time with people who were so fat positive as well. So it was quite the experience.
Chris Sandel: When it was pitched to you, did it deliver in terms of “This is what I thought I was getting myself into”? Or it was a bit of a bait and switch where you’re like, “Hang on a second, this is not what I really signed up for. This does not feel like what was on the description”?
Victoria Welsby: It was a real mixed bag. The way that it was presented to me was “We want to show the reality of living in a fat body and show the world what body positivity is about.” I was like, that’s pretty cool. Yeah, pretty amazing.
The BBC has to be very centrist in the views that they express, and that’s not something I considered. I thought it’s becoming more centrist to not be a bigot, not hate fat people. It’s becoming more normalised to say, “Being fat is a complex issue” versus “Oh, all those fat people, all they do is eat pies.” They were like, “We’re really interested in making something that is forward-thinking and thought-provoking and different from all of those exploitative shows about fat people.”
Chris Sandel: So nuance and – yeah.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah. The thing is, we all got on pretty well, and that doesn’t make good television. [laughs] They had to manufacture a couple of tension-fuelled moments, and it looked like people were getting angry when they weren’t, or it looked like people were rolling their eyes when they weren’t. A lot of cutting and pasting, things like that. I thought the BBC don’t do that.
The BBC do that. [laughs] Obviously not as bad as say Real Housewives or something, but you’d have – and cutting audio to make it – they have to cut audio anyway because they only have two hours. It’s two 1-hour docu shows. They only have two hours to get in all of this information, so they have to cut audio anyway.
But cutting some audio to make it sound like I had these extreme beliefs – for example, there’s one bit where I’m talking about health is a social construct, and there is no final destination when it comes to health. You don’t arrive at this health status where you are perfectly healthy and your health is never going to change and that’s it, black and white. You’re healthy, you’re good; you’re unhealthy, you’re bad. It’s a binary system that we look at it in society, we believe in society, and it’s not helpful versus looking at health as a spectrum. That’s a nuanced conversation.
The final product is me saying “Health is a social construct. I don’t believe in health.” To people listening, it’s like, “What do you mean, you don’t believe in health? Is there something wrong with you? What’s not to believe in health?” It makes it more interesting to not have that nuanced view.
But also, there were some really lovely, fat positive moments, and it was very clear that the people who liked their bodies were happy and were having fun, and the people who didn’t were punishing themselves and were a lot of times quite sad.
I wanted it to be a lot more radical. In reality, I should’ve known that it couldn’t have been. It was a real mixed bag of good and bad and somewhere in the middle.
Chris Sandel: Do you think they tried to turn the volume up on everything? In terms of the people who were dieting and were meant to be looking sad, they made it look even more sad because then it created this real contrast?
Victoria Welsby: Actually, no. I think they turned up the volume on the fat positive people to make them look like they were greedy for eating chips, lazy, that type of thing, and made the people who were working out and doing that look more inspirational.
Chris Sandel: It’s never a good thing to check comments, but what was the reception when it came out?
Victoria Welsby: It was a real mixed bag. I knew that already. Being a fat person on TV, you’re going to get comments. And being a fat person who thinks it’s okay to be fat, you’re going to get even more comments. I got a lot of wonderful, supportive, kind comments, people saying “This is really amazing” – and I got a lot of people saying, “You’re killing people,” “I’m going to kill you,” “You’re a piece of shit,” the usual. [laughs] The usual things as a fat person on the internet.
Chris Sandel: Were there things you said that you hoped to get across that were then in the final cut where you’re like, “I really want people to understand about weight stigma” or “I really want people to understand about shame,” and there were certain things where you’re like, “I really hope they keep this in because I think this is a strong message I have that isn’t being talked about in the way it should be”?
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, the idea about shame. That was there. And the idea about the complexity of fatness and that diets don’t work, and that fat people are not a monolith. Those things were definitely in there.
01:06:53
Chris Sandel: I watch a lot of documentaries, and I’m always trying to think, “Okay, who are the people putting this together? What is the narrative that they’re trying to tell?”, and trying to get a sense of, is it that they had a bit of an idea in mind and then they filmed someone and then, off the back of that, they let the people and the film talk for itself? Or was it like “We have this idea in mind, and then we’re going to film enough stuff so that we can put it together to tell the exact narrative that we want to be able to tell”?
Victoria Welsby: Yeah. I think they didn’t know what was going to happen, so they just filmed us. And then afterwards they said, “What story do we want to tell with the footage that we have?”
There were so many stories they could’ve told, but they didn’t. I was like, “Ooh, I know exactly how this is going to play out.” There was one guy in the house that everyone hated. He was really inappropriate and said creepy sexual innuendo stuff, and everyone was like, “Ugh, this guy is gross,” and then he threatened to leave and was really rude to the production team. I was like, “Oh, I can’t wait to see the footage of him doing that!” And then when it came out, there was nothing about that at all. I was like, damn it, what the heck? Because I was like “I can’t wait for him to realise that he’s a massive nob,” and then he came out looking okay in the footage, totally neutral. I was like, oh man.
There was a couple of others, too, that I was like, “Ooh, that’s going to look really good,” but that’s not the story they chose. They chose a different story.
Chris Sandel: Wow. Did you have to sign something where basically you have no control over final edits or anything along those lines?
Victoria Welsby: Yep. That’s it. You sign your soul away. And you don’t get paid, either.
Chris Sandel: Wow. Which I think is so much of television these days in terms of reality TV. It is something that is made for a fraction of what it costs to produce a normal television.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, absolutely. It’s like that “you’re going to get exposure.” That’s why I did it, because it was like, millions of people are going to see this. And millions of people did, but at what cost? It really affected my mental health negatively. I know in the future, is exposure worth no compensation? And for me, if I know that it’s going to be a hostile environment, then I think, “Nah, it’s not.”
Like a couple of weeks ago, I got invited to go on a BBC debate show, and I was like, “Are you going to pay me?” They said, “Oh yeah, we’ll pay you 150 quid.” I was like, “Lolz.” [laughs] 150 quid? And it was a debate with – there’s a TV doctor who’s really fatphobic. I can’t remember his name, but he spouts 300 calorie diet books and shit like that. I thought, “Is my mental health worth that exposure? Nah.” So I just didn’t go on.
Chris Sandel: I guess there’s a difference; with the exposure with the TEDx talk, you have control over it in terms of “I am writing every aspect of this, I’m creating it the way that I want it to be” – and yeah, sure, they might edit out some little bits, but they’re not editing out anything apart from maybe you fumbling over some words. People are going to see what you wanted people to see.
Whereas with something like that, you’re at the mercy of the person who is doing the questioning, you’re at the mercy of how much time you have. You can end up sitting there and in the end you’ve spoken for two and a half minutes, and it then gets framed where you look like you don’t know what you’re talking about. If the agenda is, “We need to tell the story that everyone needs to be losing weight and this is a big health crisis,” then you’re not really going to be able to say what you want to say in the way that you would on a longer form content or where you have more control.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, exactly. I’m quite wary of all the media now. I’m like, “Do I have control? Nah, I’m not that interested.”
Chris Sandel: Yeah. Did it knock you around a bit after the documentary, and it took a while to get over it?
Victoria Welsby: It did. That was very surprising, because I feel like I’m quite a stable person now. I have high self-esteem and I know my worth is not dictated by what people think about me.
But when you have two to three million people in the UK and worldwide watching you – even if say 10% think that I’m a massive nob, knowing that there are 200,000-300,000 people out there who think that I’m the biggest nob ever – which is a lot of people’s reaction – is hard. I like to think, “Oh, no, I’m never affected by people’s opinions,” but of course, I’m a human being, and I was.
That was difficult for me. Which was surprising, but it just goes to show that even when you do so much work on this stuff, you still need to protect your mental health. You’re still a living, breathing human being that can be affected by big things, and being on television is a big thing.
So that came out in November; I had to take all of December off to not look at social media and take time away and then start afresh in January, to overcome it.
Chris Sandel: I guess, like so much of social media, it is the most extreme ends of the spectrum where people are the most vocal. So you may have received lots of lovely comments of people saying, “Hey, this is amazing. You’ve changed my worldview. I love this. This is exactly what I need to hear,” but then you also get the most angry people who are then reaching out and telling you all the ways you were wrong. Even if it’s a tiny percent, you’re still receiving message after message after message. I think you have to be pretty thick-skinned to be able to deal with that.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah. Imagine if someone was to send a message to you every hour on the hour being like, “Hey Chris, you’re a piece of shit.” Eventually you’d be like, “Am I a piece of shit? Oh my God.” But then you do get thicker skin – which is unfortunate. You shouldn’t have to.
But what really got me was feeling like I let down the fat positive, body positive community because I wasn’t perfect, and I didn’t exactly portray everything perfectly. Which was an unrealistic expectation that I had put on myself. I had this opportunity to make everyone think that body positivity was absolutely 100% perfect and the best, and that didn’t happen. It was still good. But that’s what really got me: thinking that I let my team down, because fuck the bigots. I don’t care what they think. But obviously I do, as well. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: [laughs] Yeah, of course. And maybe there was nothing you could’ve done to deal with that. You didn’t have final edit, so there were probably lots of things you said over those 10 days that, if it was edited together, was the perfect thing that your team wanted them to say. But you weren’t in the edit suite.
Victoria Welsby: You know what, Chris, that is exactly right. You’re right. I did say all the perfect things. But their agenda wasn’t “Let’s make Victoria look perfect.” Their agenda was “Let’s make it entertaining.”
01:15:20
Chris Sandel: I want to chat about one of the things you recently did a podcast on, which is cults, and comparing diet culture to a cult. I said this before we actually started recording – this is a topic I’ve really wanted to do a podcast on myself about, because cults are something that are really of interest to me, and the idea of diet culture being a cult or even having an eating disorder and being under the spell of the eating disorder being like being in a cult.
So when I saw you do an episode on this, I was both happy and disappointed. [laughs] I was like, damn it, you beat me to the punch on this. But yeah, I really want to go through this because I think it’s a really helpful thing for people to start to understand.
Victoria Welsby: Chris, you can still do an episode. We’ll have totally different viewpoints. I think you need an episode on cults and diet culture on your own. I’m telling you now.
But this is really interesting. Like I mentioned before, I’m into true crime and psychology and all that type of stuff, and in the umbrella is cults. The more that I was watching documentaries and listening to podcasts and whatnot about cults, I was like, oh my God. Diet culture is a fucking cult.
Chris Sandel: Before we get into that, what have been the documentaries or the podcasts or the cults that was most entertaining – entertaining is probably the wrong word, but the most fascinating to listen to?
Victoria Welsby: Have you heard about NXIVM?
Chris Sandel: Yes. I listen to that podcast.
Victoria Welsby: They’ve got a whole – oh, the new episode came out a couple of weeks ago. On HBO there’s a six- or eight-part thing that’s come out recently about NXIVM. It’s insider stuff. It interests me because one of the whistle-blowers is from Vancouver, so I’m like, oh yeah. I could totally see how I could fall for a cult, especially something like NXIVM, which is all about self-development. I can see how you could slowly be like, “Oh shit, I’m in a cult.”
But diet culture very, very closely resembles cults. And looking into it and looking at what cults do and how they control people, and looking at the points, I’m like, “Aha. Yep, yep, yep. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick on diet culture.”
Chris Sandel: I think that’s the thing that I was interested in when I started to get into it, because I think early on, if you haven’t had any exposure to it and you’re naïve, you think, “What are these idiots getting duped into? How unintelligent must you be to fall into this trap?”
And then you actually look into it and it’s people across all walks of life who are highly educated, have huge amounts of money, through to people who are really in the midst of struggle. I think there is this idea that people are unintelligent and duped, and I really get a sense that that is not the case. Yes, there’s often people who are damaged or have had trauma or things going on in their life, but I don’t think it’s always that simple.
Victoria Welsby: No, it’s not. I think the common theme is people who are seeking. They’re seeking something. That is universal. So many of us are seeking something. I think maybe even if you’re curious and you’re looking outside of the box, you could easily fall for any type of cult. Easily.
Chris Sandel: Did you watch Wild Wild Country?
Victoria Welsby: Yes. That one was really good, wasn’t it?
Chris Sandel: Yeah, that was really well put together on Rajneesh, who then became Osho. Really well done documentary that’s on Netflix. If you haven’t watched it, I would highly recommend it. My slight annoyance with that was I would’ve liked to see more about the day-to-day insights of what it was like for the regular folks living there. It was a lot more at the top levels and focusing on the politics and all that. But yeah, it was equally fascinating. I was like, I can’t believe I’ve never even heard of this. It was a guy with 70 Rolls Royces and blowing things up and poisoning places. It was truly fascinating.
Victoria Welsby: Wild, yeah. Wild Wild Country is the perfect name for it. Wild.
Chris Sandel: It is, definitely. So how did you then get into thinking, let’s make this analogy? How did that start?
Victoria Welsby: Something about the way that we look at cults – there’s a guy called Steven Hassam, and he developed a model called the BITE model that describes the methods that cults use to recruit people and to keep them in the cult. BITE is an acronym that stands for behaviour, information, thought, and emotion control.
Cults are really smart. When we look at cults, like we were mentioning, sometimes you can think, “How can someone be duped like this?” Well, a cult doesn’t come along and be like, “Hey, we are going to ruin your life. We’re going to take your money. We’re going to make you feel like you’re a piece of shit. Come and join us!” because everyone would be like, “No thank you.” They start out really shiny and glittery and then they devalue you, and you’re stuck because you don’t think you can leave, and also you think that what you’ve learned is true.
If we go into some of the things under each one of these things – and I’ll share a couple of things, and if people want to know more, they can listen to my episode – or listen to your episode that’s going to come out whenever – so that you can see the similarities.
01:21:58
The BITE model lists under each one different things that the cult will do to recruit and to keep people in the cult. Under behaviour, something they do is regulate diet, food and drink, hunger, and/or fasting. That is very diet-y.
Another thing: major time spent with group indoctrination and rituals and/or self-indoctrination, including the internet. When we’re on a diet, we spend so much time learning about what foods we can eat, what foods we can’t eat, the way we need to be moving our body, consuming all this information online, all these before and after pictures, all that type of stuff. I was obsessed with only reading diet bullshit when I was dieting.
Next, rewards and punishments used to modify behaviours, both positive and negative. What is a better reward than seeing that you have lost weight? What is a more powerful punishment than having to see that you have gained weight, especially if you’re in a group and they’re weighing you? It’s like, “Oh, you put on weight this week.” The shame is a motivator.
Next under this behavioural control, we’ve got impose rigid rules and regulations – hello, that’s dieting – and instil dependency and obedience. Diets tell us that we have been unsuccessful at feeding ourselves; that is why we are fat. That is why we need to lose weight. Listen to them and their diet, which is the almighty secret, and then you’ll become thin. That’s just the behaviour control. Do you want me to continue with the other ones?
Chris Sandel: I was going to say, you’re doing it through diet culture and I’m doing it through the lens of an eating disorder. The same thing happens. Regulation of an individual’s physical reality. You start having someone restricting, and it starts to mess with their reality of the world. It starts to mess with their brain, like how much sleep the person is able to have. If you start restricting someone’s food, it starts messing with the quality of their sleep, the amount of sleep they’re able to get.
There’s another one with need for obedience and dependency. With the eating disorder, you are having to exercise a certain amount a day, or you’re only allowed a certain amount of calories a day. There then becomes this overlord in your mind, telling you what you’re allowed to or not allowed to do.
In the same way I think diet culture fits in, for each of these, I can go through and be like, this is the eating disorder thoughts that so many of the clients have in their mind.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, absolutely. Reading these, reading all of them – because I’m just picking out a few here and there – there’s so many you’re just like “Yep, yep, yep.” Like, hello? This is to the ‘T’ what’s going on with diet culture and eating disorders.
01:25:12
Chris Sandel: Yeah. So the next one is information control
Victoria Welsby: Information control. The first one here is deception. This is a massive one. Deception.
There has never once, in the history of the world, been a study to show that any diet works long term. Never. When I tell people this, they can’t believe it. It’s like, “Of course, there must be.” Yeah, there’s tons of studies to show that a diet can work short term, and you can lose weight temporarily. Of course you can do that, no problem. But there’s literally no way that they are providing information. They’re withholding information. This diet is saying “Come to us and you’ll lose weight.” That is deception because you probably won’t. Statistics show that you’re probably going to stay the same weight or you’re going to weigh more.
And then here we have distort information to make it more acceptable and systematically lie to the cult member. This is a big one. These diets are based on lies, and it’s bonkers to me that any diet company can be in business, really. [laughs] Imagine if any type of company was manufacturing something or making something and the product didn’t work. It’d be shut down for fraud.
Anyway, compartmentalise information into ‘outsider’ versus ‘insider’ doctrines. When I was dieting, it was very like “I am the good dieter, and everyone else who’s not dieting is wrong and bad and stupid and lazy. I have taken control of my life, and I’m doing the good things. I am going to listen to the diet and do what I’m told and be obedient, not like those lazy, stupid non-dieters, and especially lazy, stupid fat people.”
Another one from this one is extensive use of cult-generated information and propaganda, including newspapers, magazines, blah, blah, blah. The propaganda that diet culture puts out there is exhausting. I get rid of all of it from my social media, but still it creeps in. Still I have this information put in front of me of before and afters, and “You should eat this or not eat that” and blah, blah, blah. That’s information control in the BITE model.
Chris Sandel: Even when you’re trying to listen to a podcast out in the real world or just read a newspaper out in the real world, it’s not even like “Oh, I at some point subscribed to this thing and I really need to unsubscribe because I’m no longer following that way of thinking.” It’s like no matter where you turn, it becomes nigh impossible to avoid it.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, it is. Just listen to podcasts. So many of my favourite podcasts have Nume as a sponsor, and I’m like, oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m trying to listen to murder here. I don’t want to hear about losing weight. Like, God, leave me alone.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. From my end, in terms of distorting information to make it acceptable or deliberately holding back information, that’s definitely the case with eating disorders. Once people start to recover, they realise how much of their life they were missing out on and how life is now genuinely better, but that’s not what their eating disorder was telling them. It was telling them that if they did gain weight or if they did change the way they were eating, their life was going to be so much worse. And that’s definitely not what they then experience when they’re out the other side.
Misquotations, statements taken out of context from non-cult sources. There’s always just this – we talked earlier about health. Having a conversation around health, you’re getting this really one-dimensional view of health that is very much guided by the eating disorder and distorting information that is out there in terms of what is actually healthy and how complex it is, and looking at physical health and mental health and emotional health and all of the different components.
Like you were misquoted on your documentary. Misquoted because you lop off the start of a sentence and the end of a sentence and it then gives it a completely different meaning.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, and I think as well, now diet companies are trying to take body positivity and taking body positivity out of context and using that to continue to control people in the diet. They’re like, “This is going to help you love your body,” and obviously it won’t.
01:30:25
Chris Sandel: Then thought control is the next one.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah. The first one on here is require members to internalise the group’s doctrine as truth. We see this all the time. Whatever diet that people are doing, they’re like, “If you do paleo or you do” – what’s that one where you don’t eat carbs? Atkins or whatever.
Chris Sandel: Carnivore?
Victoria Welsby: Yeah, all the different stupid things, like “This is the one. This is the one that you’re going to lose weight, and magical things are going to happen.” You can’t convince them otherwise because they have taken that doctrine as truth and changing their thoughts.
Another one is teaching thought-stopping techniques which shut down reality testing by stopping negative thoughts and allowing only positive thoughts, including denial, rationalisation, justification, wishful thinking. For me, this makes me think about denying the reality of what it is like to be on a diet. Really fucking hungry, really miserable, having to change so many things about your life because you can’t eat certain foods, missing out on events and occasions, and convincing yourself, “This is good. This is to make me better,” even though the reality is that it’s shit. [laughs] It’s really shit.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, which is the same as with the eating disorder. It works in the exact same way.
Victoria Welsby: Exactly. Next we have rejection of rational analysis, critical thinking, and constructive criticism. This is another one. We have the evidence to show that dieting isn’t helpful, but when you’re in it, you can’t see that evidence.
Labelling alternative belief systems as an illegitimate evil or not useful. This is interesting because the amount of times I’ve been called ‘evil’ for saying that you don’t need to diet is really interesting. Like it’s immoral to not diet in some people’s eyes. And they really do believe it. They really do think that I am destroying people’s lives because I’m not in their diet cult.
And finally, instil a new map of reality. This is what you were mentioning before, again, about that magical thinking. Like “If you stay in this cult, if you stay on this diet, then you’re going to become thin, and then it’s going to be rainbows and fairy-tales and wonderful things are going to happen.” So when it does feel a bit shit, then you can think about, “What is the future going to hold? It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be better in the future.” But that doesn’t come to fruition because it’s all a big lie.
Chris Sandel: When you were talking about the thought-stopping techniques to shut down the reality testing, the NXIVM podcast definitely comes to mind with that in terms of how manipulative they were with language and really trying to force someone to always see the positive in things – which on the surface sounds like a really good thing, but it’s demonstrated in the podcast just how manipulative it was.
I’m blanking on the actual podcast name that had the six or seven part series.
Victoria Welsby: Toxic Positivity.
Chris Sandel: No, no, in terms of the NXIVM podcast. But I will put it in the show notes so that people can listen to it. But yeah, the toxic positivity, definitely. Talk about that.
Victoria Welsby: Actually, that’s the name of the podcast which talks about MLMs. You know about MLMs?
Chris Sandel: Yes.
Victoria Welsby: This is another thing I love. MLMs. NXIVM was an MLM as well. That toxic positivity of “Don’t question anything because if you question anything about the leader, about the system, then you are just being negative. And being negative is the reason why you’re in that situation, so you’d better stop being negative because that is what’s holding you back.”
It’s gaslighting because you’re not actually being negative. You’re actually being a normal human being and saying, “Hey, this doesn’t feel good.” And people, when they’re gaslighting and toxic positivity-ing you, they’re denying your reality and telling you that you’re wrong to feel the way that you do. Which is fucked up, obviously.
Chris Sandel: Multi-level marketing is what MLM stands for, in case someone’s wondering. John Oliver did a really great segment on it, but there was also a documentary – have you seen Betting on Zero?
Victoria Welsby: Yes. I love that, yeah. The podcast is called The Dream. Is that the one you’re talking about?
Chris Sandel: No, it’s not. It’s a Canadian one.
Victoria Welsby: There’s another one by CBC. I’m just looking at all of my podcasts I’ve got.
Chris Sandel: I will find it and I can put it in the show notes if people are interested in it, but it was like a six-part series or something. Later on there was an update episode, and then another update episode as more information came out as part of the court proceedings and everything. It is truly fascinating/ horrifying.
Victoria Welsby: You should listen to that one, though, The Dream, because that is about MLMs.
01:36:28
Cult tactics: Emotional control
Chris Sandel: The final one, which is then the emotional control?
Victoria Welsby: Emotional control. The first thing on here is manipulate and narrow the range of feelings. Some emotions or needs are deemed as evil, wrong, or selfish. So feeling hungry, emotions like fearing that the diet won’t work, “What do I do when I do lose weights? Do I have to do this forever?”, all of these emotions and needs that are natural – it’s that toxic positivity again, saying “Don’t listen to yourself. Don’t listen to what your body is telling you and what your intuition is telling you.”
Next, make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader or the group’s fault. This is massive. It’s not that the diet failed; you failed, is what they tell you. “You failed. It’s not that our product is broken. You’re the one that ‘fell off the wagon’. It’s your fault. If you followed it, you would be thin.” And that is not true.
Next we have promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness. Like, hello? You’re not living up to your potential, your past and your family and your thoughts and feelings are wrong, everything is wrong, social guilt. That’s a big thing of looking back and being like, “When I was fat and horrible, I would do things like eat this. I was such a bad person, oh my God.” Really, that’s you being a normal human being, but making you feel like you were a bad person.
Next we have instil fear, and that is massive. How many people are literally afraid of food, afraid because diet culture tells them “This food is going to do this to you. This food is unhealthy,” and fear about “What happens if I do eat this food? Who will I become?”
Extreme highs and lows. There’s diet culture. Ritualistic and sometimes public confessions of sins. When you go to a meeting, saying “I gained weight this week.” “Ooh, what did you eat? What did you do? Oh dear, very bad, very bad.”
This is a big one. This whole emotional control is like diet culture to the ‘T’. Every single one. It’s a big one. It puts the nail in the coffin that diet culture is a cult.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. If I’m doing it through the lens of eating disorders being a cult, manipulate and narrow the range of a person’s feelings – that can often be the reason people do it in terms of it helps to numb them. Then they’re like, “This is actually beneficial,” at least to start with, “because I was having to deal with all of this other stuff, having to deal with life, and now I’m not because it’s really narrowing the band.” That then becomes a problem, but it definitely ‘works’ for that.
Make the person feel like if there’s ever a problem, it’s their fault. That’s the same. If someone eats more than what they deemed appropriate, or if they don’t exercise the amount that they ‘should’, or they actually want to try and get out, and there’s any problems with that and there’s uncomfortableness with that, that’s obviously the person’s fault.
There’s use of guilt and use of fear. If you eat the wrong things, you feel guilty. If you try and eat certain foods that are now off-menu for what you have deemed you’ve allowed yourself, there’s a huge amount of fear that rises up.
There’s one for programming of irrational fears of ever leaving the group. I think that’s a huge one as people are trying to get over their eating disorder. And this is the case even when there is a rational take on “I can see that this is detrimental. I can see I do not want this as part of my life. Yes, there is some benefit to it in terms of it’s helping me in this moment or it’s helping me in this way or that way” – because nothing is 100% unhelpful. If it was 100% unhelpful, someone wouldn’t be doing it.
But it is manipulated and mistakes are set up in a way that someone believes, “If I try and leave this, I’m going to lose so much. I can see the pain this is creating, but it’s better the devil you know.”
Victoria Welsby: Yes. That final point in this group, emotional control, is so powerful. That phobia indoctrination, the irrational fears about what is going to happen. Especially if you are a fat person, no happiness or fulfilment possible outside the group. If you’re fat, your life is over. You’re not going to get a partner. You’re not going to have kids. You’re not going to be happy or fulfilled.
What are the consequences? The consequences of being fat is death, is what we’re told. Fat people die. How hard is it to leave when you think the consequences are death? Because you’ve been told that, that irrational fear which, because of weight stigma, can be rational for a lot of people. But isn’t that a massive control? Like, “Stay even if it’s shit, because if you don’t, you’ll be dead.”
Chris Sandel: And if not real dead, you’re dead socially, you’re a pariah, no one’s going to want to have you around – all of the things that then start to come up in your mind because that’s the cult that you’ve been living in.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah. Powerful stuff.
Chris Sandel: It is. We’ve only touched on some of these, but I’ll put a link to the BITE model in the show notes. I do recommend people going and checking it out and having a think through, especially if you are someone who has a long history of dieting or you are someone who’s struggling with an eating disorder, and seeing it through that lens and saying, “Does this start to make sense for why I’m having such a challenging time trying to do something different?”
I think that’s often the part where you’re like, “Why do I feel so trapped and unable to make a decision here, to do something different? I’m capable in so many other areas of my life, but this one seems like so much of a struggle. If the right choice was to change this, it would be an easy choice to make.” It’s like, no, that’s not the case, and this is the reason why it’s not the case, because all of these things have happened that have changed your worldview.
Victoria Welsby: The one thing which is different from most traditional cults and diet culture is that when you leave most traditional cults, it’s difficult and terrible and a lot of people lose their family and all that type of stuff, but they have the benefit of going out into the ‘real world’ where people say, “That cult was bad.” Whereas leaving diet culture, you leave and people say, “That was good. You should keep doing it,” and you’re bombarded with stuff saying, “Go back to the cult.” Not a safe space where you can heal.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think that is probably one of the differences. I guess for people who are in the cult, if everyone they’ve ever known is in the cult, it’s hard because when they try and leave, they have in a sense got their whole world telling them that what they’re doing is wrong. But yeah, once they get further afield, it’s different, and they do have people telling them, “It’s so great you’re now out of this cult.”
I guess in a sense, where people can find that is through podcasts like this or podcasts like yours or the body positivity movement or the fat acceptance movement, where there are more people that are saying this message, so you aren’t some lone person doing this crazy thing. You’re like, there’s a lot of numbers of people doing this that are validating why I made that choice.
Victoria Welsby: Yeah.
01:45:43
Chris Sandel: That’s where the recording got cut. As much as we tried, we couldn’t get it to work again. If you enjoyed this conversation and what Victoria had to say and want more of her, her website is fiercefatty.com. She has a podcast of the same name. Her Instagram is @Fierce.Fatty, and then Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube are all at Fierce Fatty, and her LinkedIn is Victoria Welsby.
As I said at the top, Seven Health is taking on clients for the final time this year, and there’s just one spot left, at least at the time of this recording. If you are struggling with disordered eating, eating disorders, being stuck in quasi-recovery, wanting to get over dieting, wanting to conceive or get your period back, or really any of the topics we cover as part of this show, I’d love to help. You can head over to seven-health.com/help for more information.
That is it for this week’s show. I will catch you next week. Take care of yourself, and I’ll see you then.
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